April 4th - Kalyanmoy Deb

Designing a component, process or a control system to achieve minimum or maximum of a single objective (or goal) often results in a single optimum solution describing the shape, dimensions, process or strategy of solving the task. Although such an optimized solution may already provide a new and innovative way of achieving the best objective value, it is almost never the case that practitioners are solely interested in a single objective. Moreover, a single optimum solution does not often provide adequate information to *learn* much about the problem, a matter which is ideally desired in engineering and scientific problem-solving tasks. In this seminar, we shall discuss an "innovization" procedure involving a multi-objective optimization algorithm for finding a set of trade-off optimal solutions. An investigation of such solutions is then expected to reveal useful design principles common to high-performing solutions. A number of interesting engineering case studies will be discussed to demonstrate how useful and innovative design principles can be deciphered by considering two or three-objective optimization problems. Such design innovations are difficult to achieve by any other means and the proposed systematic procedure should find a wide-spread applicability in the coming years.

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Bio: Kalyanmoy Deb is currently a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India and is the director of Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (KanGAL). He is the recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences for the year 2005. He is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), Indian National Academy of Sciences (IASc), and International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC). He has received Fredrick Wilhelm Bessel Research award from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany in 2003. His main research interests are in the area of optimization, optimal modeling and design and evolutionary algorithms. He has written two text books on optimization and more than 275 international journal and conference research papers. He is associated with 17 international journals. He has pioneered and a leader in the field of evolutionary multi-objective optimization. More information about his research can be found from http://www.iitk.ac.in/kangal/deb.htm.